The Collected Riddles
by Leaf Skeletons
Summary: Strange things happen to peculiar children


_For you: a dedication. You taught me how to draw the sun. We miss you very much. You shouldn't have left. I will never be able to thank you enough. Meet me when it's my turn so I can be as brave as you were. As you are. _

* * *

But there is a cure inside the house, and not outside it, no.

* * *

I.

Incense curls around the furniture when his grandmother prays. The joss sticks bleed out smoke that smells of jasmine and the dusty insides of a temple and the pink cakes that look like toys are piled high upon each other in a dizzying feat that has Frank fearing that they will topple off the plate. And how hell will break loose then, his grandmother could curse a streak long and wide enough to raise the oldest ancestor.

II.

"A girl named Hazel used to stay here."

"Hazel. That's a pretty name."

"She was a pretty girl," the boy nods as if he's said something profound and he's fifteen so that might be just as profound as he gets. It's a simple sentence; it doesn't mean anything unless you dig. His roof leaks and his father has a broken leg and a bad lung so the only way they can fix it is by fixing something else: a battered, rusted tin that once held paint collects the rainwater as it ripples down like castanets.

III.

Thalia eats greedily, stuffing forkfuls (they couldn't find spoons) of rice into her mouth. It's hot and it burns the roof of her tongue but each raw throb is a testament to their survival and she gulps it down like an animal: hallelujah and amen.

Luke watches her as greedily as she eats but children have no concept that is proper or fitting. Once the Tupperware is finished—the sides licked for salt (animals, animals)—she peels open the cap of a bottle and swigs the water down, dousing the flames in her throat.

"Was it good?" Luke asks. His own meal, fish and chips inexpertly heated so that they were overtly crisp and might constitute as burnt, is half-finished, sitting on his lap.

"I didn't taste it," Thalia admits, and the animal is gone, "I was too hungry."

IV.

How do the stories that your mother tell you end? Princesses live happily ever with their handsome royal husbands. The animals speak and they are all helpful. Ugly witches rot into their ugly fates. Castles fall in love with the clouds they are lost in.

And the forests, the forests. Thick and wild and alive; the woods breathe at night, lungs bursting with wildflowers and eyes glittering with moonlight.

For whom will the wild winter come?

V.

A boy and a girl of the same colouring are lost in a hotel down in the West. Sands shift outside the chrome and steel buildings and inside the glass throbs hot and white with blue lights. The sounds of the arcade filter into the air so that it's all one soupy, hypnotising mess.

The days bleed into decades but the children don't grow up.

Imagine that: Death has children that do not age.

VI.

I can hear the sound of weeping and I can see the smoke fade into the twilight gloom. The sky loses its glow the more souls are burnt into it. They're not dead, don't be sad forever. Be sad for a little while, be sad for now. Keep your sorrow for a long time, if you must but don't hold onto it forever. I don't want you to. I love you.

We are the dead, but we did not die. We fought alongside you and you are victorious. My brothers and sisters, please do not cry.

VII.

Years before the beginning of the world.

The Gods are young. They know everything, which is simply to say: nothing at all.

XIV.

And let's say, for the sake of an argument, for the sake of a fight: that all of this that you have seen had never happened.

There was no cursing grandmother, no animalistic children, no fairy-tales, and no castanet rainwater. No Gods with no ideas, no Death or his children. How would you fill the blank spaces?

But they did happen.

The grandmother did exist, and her daughter died (an envelope, a far-off war). The animal-children were people, as you know—don't forget, people often forget. Death had children and he had a lover. Death in love, imagine that. When the house was bought by new owners, they fixed the leak and the rainwater stopped coming in the house. But it stopped the music as well. The castanets sang his father to sleep.

And the dead children, those lovely, human things. Those foolish, wasteful Gods. They were here too. Now they are simply there, which is to say, you only have to look.

You only have to look.


End file.
